Occult America_ The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation - Mitch Horowitz [112]
“A reading,” Cayce replied on January 9, 1941, “would possibly help and you can arrange to take care of the fee at some future date—no one is ever refused here because of lack of money.” The following month, Cayce, in his usual preparation, loosened his tie, belt, cuffs, and shoelaces, and reclined on a lumpy gray-green sofa in the study of his Virginia Beach home. With observers and a stenographer looking on, Cayce uttered a silent prayer and drifted into a sleeplike state from which he transmitted the words of an ethereal intelligence called “the Source.” While he claimed to have no recollection of what occurred during his trances, he made detailed responses to questions, often speaking in the vernacular of the King James Bible. His statements could be stilted and difficult to follow, with none of the lucidity of the later “channeled” literature that Cayce inspired. But on scrutiny, the intent could usually be found.
Cayce counseled the man to “[keep] self unspotted from condemnation of others.” Condemnation must be “eliminated from the expressions,” for “as ye condemn, so ARE ye condemned,” he told the former Klansman. “Know,” Cayce concluded, “as the choice is made, that it must be only ‘The Way.’ For, as given, he that climbs up some other way is a thief and a robber.”
The recipient was unsatisfied. “Frankly,” he wrote Cayce, the reading at first “did not make a very favorable impression on me.” Oblivious to the reading’s ethical dimension, the man felt he had been misunderstood and wrote back: “I have no desire to make money for money’s sake.” Cayce twice wrote him to urge that he discuss the reading with one of the clairvoyant’s longtime friends and supporters, a New York furniture manufacturer named David Kahn. Like Cayce, Kahn had grown up as something of a misfit—a Jewish grocer’s son raised in Lexington, Kentucky, where the pair met in 1907. Cayce came from a small farming town and was still unsure what to make of his psychic “gift.” In a clairvoyant reading for one of Kahn’s neighbors, he prescribed little-known osteopathic treatments that restored the health of a woman who had been severely hurt in an automobile accident. Kahn became a source of encouragement and a tireless promoter of Cayce, telling journalists he was “the greatest mystic who ever lived in America.” It could not have been lost on Cayce that he was now sending a former organizer for the anti-Semitic Silver Shirts to ponder his “life reading” with a Jewish man.
But Cayce was not always so deft or so wise. While in a trance state, Cayce was on rare occasions himself heard to utter racist nostrums. Contrary to his waking behavior, such remarks seemed to bubble from the recesses of his rural childhood under a notoriously bigoted father. He suggested from a trance state on June 18, 1923, that people of African descent had no soul. During another reading, on November 4, 1933, he heralded Hitler as a man “psychically led.” Other times, Cayce could make prophecies that were just wrong—predictions of earthquakes and environmental cataclysms, social upheavals and political swings, which never occurred.
Then there was the more familiar Cayce: the man who people of all backgrounds said was marked by unusual personal decency and warmth, who often gave psychical readings for free, at times leaving himself and his family in a state of near poverty. More typical of Cayce’s trance statements was this one from June 16, 1939, when he was asked about black Americans: “He is thy brother! … For He hath made of one blood the nations of the earth.” This Cayce had an influence so vast that the accumulated record of his readings ultimately altered the American vocabulary, making words like reincarnation,